How to fix a problem like Whitehall

Why we are launching a plan for government.

“We have found no instance where reform has run ahead too rapidly. So, today, the Service is in need of fundamental change.”

These words from Lord Fulton’s 1968 report, almost six decades on, could have been written today. Indeed former Cabinet Secretary Lord Mark Sedwill has argued that “Whitehall structures would be familiar to Gladstone,” taking us back 170 years. It was the Victorian Great who commissioned the foundational Northcote-Trevelyan report which shaped the modern civil service. That’s a damning observation: the country it helps govern, and the challenges facing it, would be unrecognisable to Gladstone. So too should the Civil Service.

As (yet another) new Cabinet Secretary settles into post, this is the machine she inherits – one whose modernisation is long overdue, and which is in urgent “need of fundamental change”.

A State in stasis

That mid-nineteenth Northcote-Trevelyan report was born of a frustration with the quality, competency and efficiency of the civil service, at a time when government business was growing and becoming more complex. Sound familiar?

The report, published in 1854 established key principles upon which a permanent civil service should be built: civil servants, recruited based on merit, and acting with impartiality.

Government is infinitely bigger and more complex now: the welfare state is immense; the Quangocracy’s tentacles reach into almost every aspect of our lives; the administrative burden of processing, checking, assessing and reviewing consumes thousands of people and millions of hours.

When Gladstone tasked Northcote and Trevelyan there were likely less than 20,000 civil servants. Today there are over 500,000. Yet despite this, the government machine still appears incapable of delivering consistently and at scale.

The latest report from the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) records 213 projects, 78% of which are rated Amber or Red; backlogs plague the NHS, the justice system, the immigration system and SEND; our defence procurement is best known for its failure to replace Britain’s ageing armoured fighting vehicles, a process that began in 2010 and 16 years and £6 billion later still has delivered nothing useable.

We could talk about housing, high streets, transport, school attendance, school achievement, youth unemployment, economic inactivity, defence readiness, pandemic readiness, social care, public sector technology. This is not a post about the condition of public services so I won’t, but you will recognise the picture I am painting. The public certainly do: the State now costs us over a trillion pounds, yet the public consistently report being deeply dissatisfied with what it delivers.

We might point, by way of explanation, to the long shadow of Covid-19 (though I would note that the pandemic was a good example of serious Whitehall inadequacy), to rising public demand and expectation, to the pressures created by the collapsing international rules-based order, an ageing population and advancing technologies. This is all fair, but while these may help explain the acuteness of the challenge, they are no excuse for repeated deficiencies.

Indeed, this context only further illustrates the need for the highest performing Civil Service, imbued with resilience, adaptability and creativity. A fit-for-purpose Civil Service is, by definition, one equipped for this era of crisis – our new normal.

On entering office, Keir Starmer issued a message to the Civil Service declaring :“you have my confidence, my support and, importantly, my respect”. The view of the new Government seemed to be that the bad Tories, and their attacks on the good public servants of the Civil Service, was the entire source of their delivery failures. Public services could be fixed, if only ministers were more collaborative and kinder to their officials.

No doubt there were examples where a breakdown in relations did impact performance. Certainly leaks and anonymous briefings on both sides were rife in the years post-Brexit. Yet, less than six months after entering Downing Street, Starmer was arguing that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.

He came in wanting to fix things, and on experiencing the government machine had almost immediately found it wanting.

A further three months on, in March last year, the PM wrote that “The Civil Service has grown by 130,000 since the referendum, and yet frontline services have not improved. It’s overstretched, unfocussed and unable to deliver the security people need today”. He gave a speech criticising “A sort of cottage industry of checkers and blockers”. Turns out it wasn’t as simple as showing “respect”, important though that is.

Starmer’s words point to a Civil Service that is slow, overwhelmed, concerned with tick-box process over solution-focused doing. And as the PM has discovered – like successive PMs before him – improving the quality of the Civil Service is not a technocratic exercise, it is the basis for transforming the State.

The blame game

Some will argue that the lion’s share of the blame for this must be laid at the feet of politicians. As you read the Starmer quotes, you may well have been asking: ‘but what of the absence of any plan for fixing public services? What of the lack of political prioritisation and vision?’

Quite clearly, the consequences of politics – election cycles, underprepared or ill-suited ministers, ministerial churn, indecision, a seeming endless lack of political courage, rebellious backbenchers focused on their own electorate and not the national interest – have a profound impact on the functioning of government.

The poor pre-election preparation by the current Government was particularly egregious. The ministerial churn under the last few equally so. The Quangocracy has been built by ministers, even if it has taken on a life of its own. The social care crisis, as one example, is the result of political cowardice; a fear of the electoral cost (in this case due to the literal cost) of doing the right thing.

Britain should expect better of her politicians. But it is lazy, and far too convenient, to say all would be well if only we had a better class of minister; if annoying democracy didn’t get in the way.

Our permanent civil service is in part the technocratic counterbalance to the ambition and uncertainty inherent in politics. It is there to serve the government of the day – as then Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstong so clearly laid out in his 1985 memorandum – with the expertise to ensure successful delivery of their policies and priorities. Ministers rely almost entirely on civil servants to have the knowledge, skills, talent and creativity to find the right answers, design effective implementation plans, and execute the delivery of their policies. That is not the responsibility of ministers. It is not the responsibility of ministers to project manage major programmes, to procure goods and services, to design and deliver IT systems or to hire or performance manage civil servants.

It is therefore essential that this permanent body is operationally brilliant – and that means addressing the deep-rooted flaws in how Whitehall functions. As one former permanent secretary put it to us, it means ensuring “systemic capability”.

Perhaps the strongest evidence point both for change – and confirming that politics is not solely to blame – is the deep frustration felt by civil servants themselves, who live these systemic flaws on a daily basis. Throughout the research for our ‘Re:Imagining Whitehall’ programme we have spoken to current and former civil servants who have been generously candid with their experiences, views and, often, criticisms, of the environment within which they work. Their own words about the system are often the most cutting – and while there is absolutely exasperation with some ministers, much of their ire is focused on the pathologies of the Service itself.

In Civil unrest, civil servants spoke extensively about a system lacking dynamism and creativity, and closed to outside input: “our very weak and timid civil service…truly doesn’t want to do anything radical”; “it is almost adversarial to questions, adversarial to inquiry, adversarial to just basic openness”. They also highlighted poor leadership, groupthink, and sub-standard recruitment and performance management processes.

Talent and poor performance management was the focus of our report Making the grade, and the evidence of a system failing to prioritise building a high-performing workforce, equipped with the skills required for the modern age and able to incentivise and reward talent and remove consistent poor performers, is damning.

In our Alternative people survey, just 8% of civil service respondents agreed that “The civil service in general manages poor performance well”. Also illustrative of a broken model, 70% agreed with the statement “I often feel that processes get in the way of me performing my job” and a mere 24% agreed that “My department actively encourages and rewards civil servants who try to innovate”.

None of this is the responsibility of ministers. All of it illustrates the urgent need for radical reform.

We know the answer

This should not be controversial. Among those of us who work in and around Whitehall, the diagnosis is strikingly consistent (take a look at this incredible library of reports on the topic compiled by Martin Stanley). Yet despite the almost universal consensus that the machinery of government is not fit for purpose – evidenced by countless reports and reviews and commissions all reaching similar conclusions – we trundle on. It is not that we have had no reform, but that it has been too incremental, or too narrowly targeted. It has not tackled the fundamental drivers of a ‘can’t do’ culture; the plumbing of that “tepid bath”.

One response would be to call for a new Northcote-Trevelyan. To set up a learned commission, composed of the great and the good, to undertake a serious review in order to publish The [insert name here] Report. A 21st century version of that foundational document.

That would be the wrong answer.

Just as setting up a Commission on social care is the wrong answer: we know what the problems are, and if we were prepared to be more honest, we know the answers. Civil service reform is the same. I am not saying there wouldn’t be disagreement about precise methods, but that would also be true of attempts to implement a Commission’s findings. The devil is always in the execution.

Which is exactly the nub of the problem: implementation.

If there have been so many reports, if successive governments have identified the same problems, why has so little been done? That was the first question we asked when we launched ‘Re:Imagining Whitehall’, and to try and answer it we interviewed almost 30 former cabinet secretaries, permanent secretaries, cabinet ministers, director generals and senior political advisers.

The result was Breaking down the barriers: why Whitehall is so hard to reform. The overriding answer was a lack of ownership of the corporate transformation of Whitehall (one former permanent secretary quipped “There’s a question mark over whether there is a structure at the top of the civil service which is actually, in any meaningful way, managing it”), and an executive centre too weak to drive change.

This is compounded by a system too insular to innovate, run by a cadre of top mandarins too similar and too lacking in outside experience to identify new methods and models, and too cosy in the status quo. And when reform is attempted – and departmental “eye-rolling” is overcome – too little time and resource is invested in change management, with insufficient engagement to secure buy-in across the system.

All of these observations, provided directly by those who have led the system, ring true. But we now think there’s an additional answer, one which is complimentary to this analysis: no one has actually produced the alternative documents, processes, statements, frameworks and regulations that would form the building blocks for a transformed Whitehall. We all talk about needing new versions, expecting someone, somewhere to produce them.

A plan for government

Think tanks and other external reports have been very good at pointing out (at times too keenly admiring?) the problem. They have, to different degrees, been effective at proposing an alternative direction. Some, I would include us at Re:State, have been granular in setting out the answers. But this is not the same thing as producing the ‘thing’ that underpins a recommendation.

We call for changes to procurement, and lay out what we want to be achieved, but we don’t draft a new National Procurement Policy Statement. We write in detail about how performance management must change, but we don’t actually write the new policies and produce the assessment templates. We call for reform to the Civil Service Code, but we don’t produce a new one.

We hope that civil servants or ministers will translate them into the required new documents, legislation or regulation. They won’t: ministers are too often fire-fighting, and anyway would lack the time and expertise, and the Civil Service has proven it is not a self-reforming institution.

Which is why we at Re:State have decided to cut out this translation step.

Today we are launching our new ‘Plan for government’ programme, which will see us shift our energies to producing a series of ready to implement products – draft legislation, codes, rules, plans and frameworks – that the current or an incoming government can use to rewire Whitehall.

Tomorrow we are publishing the first product in this programme, a new draft of one of the most emblematic documents: a new Civil Service Code, the document which governs the values and standards of all civil servants.

“The old machinery is simply no longer fit for purpose…We need to remake it for the 21st century.” Lord Sedwill’s words from our essay collection last year echo those of Northcote and Trevelyan in the 19th century, and of Fulton in the 20th.

Achieving a transformed State is, of course, a bigger task. Fundamental questions must be posed about its shape and role, about what it should and should not do, who should do it, and how it should be done. But transforming the State will, in large part, rely on the Civil Service. That is why “fundamental change” is once again needed. Our ‘Plan for government’ will provide building blocks to deliver that change.